Life-like Cellular Automaton

Life-like Cellular Automaton

A cellular automaton (CA) is Life-like (in the sense of being similar to Conway's Game of Life) if it meets the following criteria:

• The array of cells of the automaton has two dimensions.
• Each cell of the automaton has two states (conventionally referred to as "alive" and "dead", or alternatively "on" and "off")
• The neighborhood of each cell is the Moore neighborhood; it consists of the eight adjacent cells to the one under consideration and (possibly) the cell itself.
• In each time step of the automaton, the new state of a cell can be expressed as a function of the number of adjacent cells that are in the alive state and of the cell's own state; that is, the rule is outer totalistic (sometimes called semitotalistic).

This class of cellular automata is named for the Game of Life (B3/S23), the most famous cellular automaton, which meets all of these criteria. Many different terms are used to describe this class. It is common to refer to it as the "Life family" or to simply use phrases like "similar to Life".